When our qualities are off wandering, what can we do with ourselves?

I was interested in reading Maurice Sachs’s memoirs, Le Sabbat after enjoying his Au Temps du Boeuf sur le Toit, which I reviewed here. As Guy Savage was interesred too, we coordinated and read it at the same time. So another post is published on his blog. I recommend to read his review as it will show these memoirs in another light.

Maurice Sachs was born in 1906, in a bourgeois family in Paris. He was of Jewish origin but never went to the synagogue. He has few memories of his childhood, except his English nurse Suzy and his wish to be a girl. His parents were divorced, he was living with an indifferent mother (very close to the character of Mrs Farrange in What Maisie Knew, now that I think of it) and never heard about his father after he left. He was sent to boarding school where he learnt nothing useful but read a lot and definitely accepted to be gay. Back from school, he spent a few years with his newly-wed mother. He lived his first true love with a boy named Oscar, a feeling he says he’d struggle to relive all his life.

When his mother inherited a large sum, she decided to manage it herself and went bankrupt. His world collapsed and he helped her evading to Great-Britain to avoid prison for debts. He was 15 when it happened, was left alone and had to fend for himself as almost all their acquaintances turned their back on him. After a while, he decided to join his mother in London, where he worked for a twelve-month as a bookseller. He chose to come back to France in 1922. He was only 16.

This Maurice Sachs who is shady, elusive, a real schemer, a drunkard, untidy, curious, loving, generous and passionate; this Maurice Sachs who grew up in spite of me but with my complicity and who turned into that repulsive but sometimes touching character and to whom I’m so attached because he is me anyway (…); this Maurice Sachs who writes this confession that closes a period of our life and hopefully writes it with this very hand that is both his and mine; this Maurice Sachs really dates back to those early days of 1922 when I came back from England. Chapter 9

In 1922, he started partying in Paris; it was the time of Au Boeuf sur le Toit, a place where the golden youth of that time used to hang out. He was part of Cocteau’s crowd and he adored him like an idol. He was his fan, worshipping the ground Cocteau walked on. He was 16 and had the same enthusiasm for Cocteau than a nowadays teenager could have for a rock star.

Thanks to Cocteau, Maurice Sachs met Jacques Maritain, a Catholic devout. He changed of guru, converted to Catholicism, planned to become a priest and got in a seminary. No one seemed more ill-fitted for seminary life than him. (apart from Casanova maybe?). After a few months of happiness and peace in blissful rituals, strict routine and soothing prayers, chastity became a burden. He left the seminary.

He was due to military service and had to spend 18 months as a soldier. He didn’t want to be an officer. He rather enjoyed life in the army, which is highly improbable for someone not so keen on discipline. There was no such rule as “Don’t ask, don’t tell” but he thought it more prudent to hide he was gay and manfully survived through his relationship with a girl who had elected him as her man of the moment. The other soldiers thought he was lucky, it was impossible to refuse such a gift.

Back to civilian life, he came back to Paris and had an awful meeting with André Gide. He worked as a librarian for Coco Channel, tried to be part of the high society of the Boulevard Saint Germain, always spending more that he could afford and thus always running after money.

After a while, he shipped himself to New York to manage an art gallery. A failure. Introduced in the NY society, he was hired as a speaker for a tour of the USA. During that tour, he met Gwladys, who wanted to get married to liberate from her parents and leave her little town of Morpheus. On a whim, Sachs proposed to her and she accepted. They got married in Morpheus after he converted to their Presbyterian faith. Unsurprisingly, the whole marriage turned into a big failure and he abandoned her. It was the kind of departure where the guy goes out to buy cigarettes and never comes back. Sachs writes “I had married her like a crazy man; I left her like a coward”.

In California he met Henry; they fell passionately in love and Maurice Sachs persuaded him to come back to Paris with him. After a few months of happiness in the country near Chartres, they were back to Paris. Their come back was a slow go down into the underworld of poverty. They were filthy poor, lived in a dump hotel, the Hôtel Saint-Joachim, among a strange crowd of semi-artists. Maurice Sachs drank heavily and spent his time chasing after money.

When Maurice Sachs wrote his memoirs, in 1939, he was only 33. Really young to write memoirs. I think he wrote this book when he was in rehab for alcoholism. It’s an exorcism. He tries to slough off his former self, the hateful Maurice Sachs who, as quoted before, was born in 1922. He wants it to be a resurrection, at 33, the age Jesus was when he died and resurrected. I’m not sure it is a coincidence.

Maurice Sachs had no moral roots, no principles. He just grew up like a weed. He was lazy, crazy, always making a fool of himself and always full of himself too. No idea of grandeur was foreign to him. That same grandeur that turned men into heroes during WWII turned him into a weed. His male models were either weirdos, debauchees or saints. He never compared himself to average men, to reachable models.

He was aware of his vices and aimed at virtue but he lacked persistence and temperance. Words like “decency”, “integrity” or “honesty” were in his dictionary but as a vague ideal he couldn’t reach for himself. This book can only foresee what he would do during WWII, black market, work for the Gestapo. As long as there was money to be earned, no moral issue could get in the way.

He drank heavily, tried drugs. And yet, with all this, he managed to be a member of the prestigious reading committee of the NRF (Nouvelle Revue Française) He always kept in touch with the literary world. How charismatic, witty and intelligent he must have been for people to help him along the way despite his despicable flaws. In the last years of these memoirs, he had started to write plays and novels but he doesn’t talk about his literary work.

For some reason, the guy was incapable to work. He could have been a waiter, a cleaner or whatever instead of living in misery in a dump hotel. It seems that having a regular job was impossible to him. He was too snob, too lazy for that. He had so much pride and blinded confidence in luck and in his personal qualities. He was a gambler. He gambles his life, bet on his qualities and always expected a turnaround of luck.

Maurice Sachs was a homosexual and I appreciated how he casually describes his sexual preferences in this book, although it was still a crime at the time. His lack of moral education was an advantage on that field. He was never taught to think homosexuality as a deviance. Cocteau was homosexual too and so was Proust. He knew he wasn’t alone and had great models in mind.

I thought his memoirs a little dry; I would have liked more anecdotes or thoughts about society and “l’air du temps”. I enjoyed the chapter about Proust and Albert, the model for Jupien. The description of Morpheus is really vivid and the other inhabitants of the Hôtel Saint-Joachim are depicted in a colourful manner. Sachs had a real literary style, rather close to Kessel for example. They were from the same generation and the reader can feel the imprint of the time. The syntax is still traditional; he uses the “imparfait du subjonctif”, a past tense nobody uses any more. It’s not heavy, it’s formal, more formal than Gary’s first short stories I read lately. He sounds a bit old fashioned too, like when he uses such expressions as “the age of manhood”. It would also be interesting to compare his style to Saint-Exupéry’s, another writer of that generation. As shown in the next quote, Sachs could write well but he was not innovative.

I recall the well-polished drawers and a scent of comfort reaches my nostrils as id the living-room smelled of fresh bread; I’m reminded of Sunday chicken that one eats with a contented heart and a heartily appetite. (chapter 13)

I translated the quotes and I found Sachs really hard to translate into English. Curiously, Sachs mentions that being a writer was the first career path he thought of. Writing was important to him but he seldom evokes his literary work but for the last chapters.

There is a lot of name dropping in this book. It didn’t bother me, it came naturally to Maurice Sachs. He lived in the literary world and literature was the one and only topic he really studied.

His work is full of literary references: he sees himself as a Balzacian heroe, as a new Julien Sorel. Proust is hovering over his shoulder as THE model, I think. He’s hidden in that sentence “C’est pourquoi elle était revenue y terminer ses jours pour tenter to recapture the past” The English translation would be “She came back to end her life here in an attempt to recapture the past”. In English, Time Recaptured is the last volume of In Search of Lost Time... The following quote reminds me of Candide by Voltaire:

You have to be your own gardener: pull out your weeds, walk the dreadful path side by side with yourself and when you’re disgusted with yourself, sweat out the bad smells and work, work until your soul is all cleaned up. Because you can’t rely on anybody to clean up your soul. On Nobody. On this lonely and scorching path, there are road signs though. You need to watch them carefully, follow some of the instructions, resume walking. Nobody on the way, nobody at the arrival; some arms held on the road. Chapter 13

Here I found Mademoiselle Viaud, petite, dark-haired with a tanned face, dry hands, who used to sew but was the soul of the gossips that circulated from stair to stair at an incredible speed. (chapter 32)

When he’s in the army, his lover’s name is Lisbeth and she sorts of force him into the relationship. Does he think himself as the Stanislas that Lisbeth (La Cousine Bette) loves and who has to put up with it? Is Lisbeth her real name or was it just for the literary reference?

Sachs also plays with words and knowing Guy was reading the English translation, I often wondered how the translator had fared with specific passages or translated double meanings of words. Here is an example at the end of chapter 14:

“Tout en nous croit en elle, comme tout de nous a crû neuf mois en elle du jour de la fécondation” (All in us believes in her, like all of us have grown nine months in her from the day of fertilization). Sachs plays with the conjugation of “croire” (believe) and “croître” (grow). So the sentence could also be translated as All in us grows in her, like all of us have believed in her from the day of fertilization. Only the ^ on “cru” lets the reader know that the first meaning is the good one. Orally, the sentence can be understood in both ways.

I’d be curious to know what the translator did with “J’aurais aimé la voix d’une femme qui dit “mon ami” et qui veut dire “mon amant”, ce vouvoiement qui tutoie” (chapter 18) , which means I would have loved the voice of a woman who says “my friend” and means “my lover”, addressing to me as a “tu” but saying “vous”. In French, “mon ami” can be used for friend, lover or partner. Only the inflection of the voice can tell you what the person intends to say.

Like Rousseau in Les Confessions, Sachs is looking for the reader’s compassion. Though he doesn’t show any indulgence for his vices and never tries to present himself as a victim, he wants the reader to forgive him all the things he has done. I didn’t find Maurice Sachs likeable because of his unquenchable need for money combined with his laziness. Post Office was a novel about a drunkard and Bukowski is not a model for virtue. But he worked hard in that post office, enduring horrendous hours and dreadful working conditions. Maurice Sachs was never able to keep a position for long without taking advantage of it. Of course, you can always argue that he had a miserable childhood and that no one really took care of him during his formative years. That’s an explanation, not an excuse.

In the 1960s, Maurice Sachs would have been Jim Morrison, enjoying fame, money, sex, booze and drugs while dreaming of being Rimbaud or some other literary model.

In the 1980s, he would have been a well-read John Self, the fictional character of Money by Martin Amis. With his rotten background, he would have written commercials, enjoyed money, sex, booze, cocaine and would have died of AIDS before the end of the decade.

Chapter 18:
I might have been passionately happy with a woman, I think, if I had cared more for the sex physically, but my body, though quite capable of performing its masculine functions, did so valiantly and without voluptuous pleasure. Oh, we both experienced that thrill of pleasure afforded by the rising sap, but it was not the overwhelming joy, that delicious laceration, that peak to which the flux of desire carries you, nor that abyss into which the spasm flings you; it was not a liquor of the soul that I poured into Lisbeth’s tender orifice, but merely a froth of the body.

(After typing out that paragraph, I think Sachs missed a career in Bodice-ripping romances)

ah ah ah. You’re so funny (and you’re right, except that they would say pussy instead of orifice)
They just spoke like this at the time. Very Kessel in Belle de Jour, you know. (btw all the fantasies shown in the film aren’t in the book)

Actually, I wanted to use “I regard myself as a bad example capable of giving good advice.” for the title of the post but I couldn’t find a satisfactory translation…
He really made me think of Rousseau. (I loathed studying Les Confessions in school. Thankfully we only did excerpts. All this self-pity) I didn’t feel that much compassion for Sachs, did you? He had many opportunities to have a good, honest and comfortable life and he was always building castles in the air. I’m too down-to-earth to feel compassion.

Ah Ha!
I realized one morning that I had misread Stephen Hudson’s sentence: On est comme on nait (one is as one is born)as comme on est (as one is).

I hadn’t heard of Au Boeuf sur le Toit until you mentioned it in your earlier Sachs review. When did it close? (WWII?)

As for compassion: well I felt as though he was the sort of person who was destined for unhappiness. This may sound odd, but I think it’s a burden to be given the taste for leisure and luxury but not the means to have that lifestyle. That can breed weak character. Better to grow up knowing that you have to work damn hard if you want to eat.

I still have many questions about what Sachs actually did during WWII that made him so despised.

Le Boeuf sur le Toit still exists. (34 rue du Colisée, 75008 Paris) http://www.boeufsurletoit.com/ According to Wikipedia, the French expression “faire le boeuf” (jam session) comes from it. I’m going to visit the place or at least the street next time I go to Paris (in 10 days) if I have enough time. I’ll tell you about it.

“This may sound odd, but I think it’s a burden to be given the taste for leisure and luxury but not the means to have that lifestyle.” You’re right. That makes me think about this book you reviewed (I don’t remember the title) about a French criminal in the 19thC who lost his social position and turned into a criminal instead of simply work.

Sachs worked for the Gestapo, that’s what made him so despised. He went to the STO by himself, he wasn’t sent. If he had double-crossed the Gestapo and worked for the Resistance, it would be known. France was really willing to show as many resistants as possible after the war.
That period left scars. “Thou shall not denounce somebody to the authority” is now in our DNA. It’s not socially acceptable to denounce someone to the boss, whoever the boss is (teacher, superior at work, police, state…) When a French sees a sign like “report drunk drivers” in the USA, he/she’s incredulous. Who in their right mind would do it in France?

The person you reference was L’elegant Criminel Lacenaire, and yes there are indeed similarities. The taste for luxury, the bankrupt relatives, the need for work combined with a sense of entitlement.

There’s a criminal who was executed for being a collaborator after WWII …can’t remember the name but there’s now some doubt about his activities. And then there’s the Gange des Tractions Avant. I’d like to find a book about their activities in English…

I was disappointed too, but probably not for the same reasons. From you review, I understand you are disappointed that the memoir ended before WWII and it gave you no clue to understand Sachs’s behaviour during the war. There’s a clue, though : he has no moral roots and that attraction to “grandeur” (a concept well described by Wharton in French Ways and their Meaning, btw) combined with the absence no moral compass can lead him to do anything.

I was disappointed not to read more analysis and more relevant anecdotes about Paris and the literary world of the time. I thought for example that the description of the other guests of the hotel Saint Joachim was too long compared to other passages. He didn’t want to talk that much about his time with Cocteau, though the portrait he made of him isn’t really nice but I would have wanted more. Well, it was in Au Boeuf sur le Toit anyway. I would have wanted to know more about his family. It’s sad to think he helped his mother but lost her trace.
Sometimes it was hard to remember how young he was when he lived all this.

I’ve been to “Au Boeuf sur le Toit” tonight. It’s not on the same premises than the original place. It’s a brasserie now, full of tourists (Americans, mostly). I was a little slow to answer to the waiter and he was so used to foreign tourists that he started to speak to me in English, he thought I couldn’t speak French!!

I took a picture but I can’t upload it in the comments, unless you know how to do it.
Inside, the decoration is Art Déco. There are pictures of jazz, Cocteau and his crowd, Josephine Baker… There’s also a “painting” made of graffitis and drawings by the Dada Group.
It has become very neat and “rangé” compared to what it was. What a pity.
I’m glad I went there though.

I don’t know if it’s a famous spot. The best would be to look in a foreign tourist guide book.

I’ve been to Paris last week end too, visiting La Tour Eiffel and Montmartre. Truly, when you don’t answer quickly enough clerks and waiters assume you can’t speak French and start speaking English. It seems we’ve improved in that field.